The Corpse That Wouldn’t Die: The Shape of the Right: An Autopsy of American Conservatism-A Ten Part Series, Nr 9

Conservatism in the Age of Post-Truth

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” — Philip K. Dick

This essay is part of The Shape of the Right: An Autopsy of American Conservatism, a ten-part exploration of the ideas, myths, and moral compulsions that shaped the American Right. I’m not here to sneer or to support it, but to understand how a movement that began with sermons and self-discipline grew into a politics of grievance and spectacle. Each essay stands on its own, but together they form an autopsy, not of a party, but of a moral psychology that still thinks it’s the soul of the nation.

Sitting With the Body

I find myself sitting here again, the reluctant coroner of a political tradition I once thought had a real heartbeat. I keep telling myself I’ve got better things to do than study this thing on the table, yet here I am again, leaning closer, wondering if this time I’ll see something that makes sense. Some part of me still hopes to find a pulse, even though I know the body has been cold for years. I suppose that’s what affection does. It keeps us checking on the dying long after the living have moved on.

I’m not trying to be cruel. I’m trying to be honest in a time when honesty feels almost impolite. Conservatism as a moral tradition is gone, yet its body keeps twitching. I reach for the zipper, and the fingers curl around it. I try to step away, and some faint spasm pulls me back. There’s a strange sadness in watching an idea that once valued restraint and virtue now survive only through spectacle and noise. Stranger still is how many people are willing to pretend the corpse is merely sleeping.

There really was a time when conservatism offered something dignified. It spoke about temperance. It defended institutions because it believed society needed anchors. It argued that freedom without character is just chaos dressed up as liberty. I believed that once. Many of us did. And when I look at the movement today, I don’t see the heir of those virtues. I see a distant cousin that inherited the wardrobe and none of the conscience.

When the Heart Stopped

The death wasn’t sudden. It was a slow unravelling, so gradual that entire decades passed with no one admitting what was happening. Each era seemed to remove one more organ. Faith in truth evaporated. The sense of civic duty shrank. The humility that once defined the best conservative thinkers thinned to almost nothing. By the time the twenty first century arrived, the body was mostly hollow.

If you ask me when the heart truly stopped, I’ll give you choices. Maybe it was the moment truth became optional. Maybe it was when cruelty became a sign of strength. Maybe it was when victory became the only moral compass. Or maybe it was when people decided responsibility was someone else’s burden. Yet when I’m honest with myself, the death began earlier. It began when the movement discovered that it could project strength without embodying it. Real strength requires humility. Real strength listens. Real strength admits mistakes. The modern version can’t imagine any of that.

Now the tubes keep the limbs moving. One pumps nostalgia. Another pumps fear. A third pumps whatever Fox News has mixed in the back room that evening. These tubes don’t give life. They give animation. They keep the face twitching and the mouth forming something that resembles sentences. They keep the brand alive even though the soul slipped out years ago.

I sometimes picture the entire movement as a traveling carnival, its star attraction a wax figure hooked up to emotional plumbing. The barker tells the crowd the old gods have returned, invites them to see the garment of truth restored. The crowd leans in, never noticing the garment is polyester and the figure beneath it smells faintly of embalming fluid.

The Resurrection Industry

I don’t write this because I enjoy the imagery. I write it because part of me still remembers what this tradition once offered. I remember thinking it was the place for adults, the place where ideas were tested rather than shouted. I remember believing it was the place where people wrestled with hard truths instead of inventing easy enemies. There were moments in our history when that was true. Those moments now sit behind glass, relics of a museum no one funds anymore.

The corpse stays upright because people find memory easier than maturity. Nostalgia whispers that life used to make sense, that any confusion we feel now must mean someone stole clarity from us. Nostalgia is a powerful numbing agent. It deadens the pain of uncertainty. It tells us the past was pure even if the past never existed.

Fear is the other tube keeping the corpse animated. Fear of difference. Fear of decline. Fear of change. Fear of complexity. Fear is a natural part of the human condition, but modern conservatism treats it as spiritual nourishment. Fear makes people feel focused. It creates simple villains and simple explanations. It convinces people they’re protecting a world that in truth is only a memory of a memory.

The tube labeled Fox News is a mixture of the comic and the tragic. It pumps alarm into the bloodstream. It whispers stories about invasion, betrayal, and destruction. It trains its audience to live in permanent dusk. And it does all of this while claiming that truth is whatever feels true. Once feelings replaced facts, the corpse sat up on the table, stretched its arms, and asked for a ballot.

Living in the Age of Post Truth

Sometimes I look at this and think the whole country has fallen into a kind of collective fever dream. I don’t use the word madness as an insult. I use it as a diagnosis. When a culture loses truth, it loses its sense of shared reality. Without shared reality, community collapses. Without community, democracy has nothing to stand on.

The age of post truth didn’t sneak through the back door. We held it open. We got used to seeing outrage as entertainment. We treated opinions like personalities. We rewarded volume over insight. We clicked and shared and scrolled and raged. And the market saw what moved us and kept feeding it to us. Rage doesn’t need coherence. It only needs oxygen.

Sometimes I sit with all of this and ask myself what we’re really mourning. Are we mourning conservatism’s collapse as a moral tradition, or are we mourning the collapse of the country we thought we lived in. Maybe we’re mourning the discovery that the virtues we idealized were more fragile than we wanted to admit. Maybe the corpse is not just the body of a movement but a mirror we’ve been avoiding.

The Cult of the Undead Republic

The myth of the real America is one of the most enduring myths we’ve ever produced. It promises a world that was simple, orderly, and morally clear. It promises a time when roles were certain and anxieties were manageable. It promises a past that answers all our fears about the present. The problem is that this world never existed. Yet the corpse draws strength from it just the same, because myth offers comfort in a way history never can.

And here’s where the grief arrives for me. I’m not angry at this corpse. I’m heartbroken. I’m heartbroken because I remember a version of conservatism that asked something of us. It asked for discipline. It asked for reflection. It asked for sacrifice. It asked us to be adults. Now the movement asks only for allegiance and anger, and it rewards those who give both without hesitation.

The corpse wouldn’t stand upright without its audience. It feeds on applause. It feeds on enemies. It feeds on the thrill of decline. It feeds on people mistaking adrenaline for meaning. And I suspect many people know, deep in their bones, that the truth is too painful to face because it would require them to stop performing and start becoming.

What the Mirror Shows

I find myself thinking about the old philosophers more often these days. Kierkegaard warned that despair comes from refusing to become the self we’re called to be. Weil believed that refusing to see reality is a form of violence against the soul. Baldwin reminded us that nothing can be changed until it’s faced. These thinkers understood something about the human desire for illusion. They understood the cost of living inside lies. They understood that every society that chooses fantasy over truth eventually pays in suffering.

Modern conservatism has become proof of that suffering. It’s sacrificed truth to protect identity. It’s sacrificed humility to protect dominance. It’s sacrificed community to protect hierarchy. And it’s sacrificed the future to protect a past that never existed. This is the kind of tragedy that hurts because no enemy caused it. The wounds were chosen.

And yet I don’t believe the story ends here. Corpses don’t last forever. Performances don’t last forever. Even illusions decay eventually. And truth, no matter how often it’s denied, waits with a patience that humbles us. History’s full of moments when nations lost their way and somehow rediscovered moral clarity. Collapse isn’t only destruction. Sometimes it’s the clearing that allows new growth.

If there’s hope in this autopsy, it’s not in the corpse. The corpse has nothing left to offer. The hope lies in the virtues conservatism once cherished and then abandoned. Prudence. Temperance. Responsibility. Community. These virtues aren’t partisan. They’re human. They can rise again in new forms, in new voices, in new movements that remember adulthood is the price of a healthy society.

The Last Look

Until that day comes, the corpse will keep stumbling through our civic life. It’ll roar. It’ll gesture. It’ll promise restoration. It’ll claim it alone can save us. And people will believe it because belief has become easier than knowledge. But belief without truth is just performance, and performances always end.

Sometimes I imagine the carnival finally closing for the night. The lights dim. The music stops. The wax figure slumps. And for the first time in a long time, the silence feels honest.

I suppose the real question now is whether we’re ready for the silence, or whether we’ll keep buying tickets to a show that ended years ago.

Because the corpse isn’t the only one making choices.

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